Time Travelers Never Die - Jack McDevitt [133]
They found a café and went inside. Helen lowered herself into a chair near the window. “I can’t believe this is really happening.”
He described what he and Shel had been doing. Told her about Michael’s determination to stay where he was. The waitress came, and they ordered coffee.
“It’s hard to believe any of this,” she said. “Even with that sitting in front of me.” She indicated the street scene outside the window. A couple of guys were passing in a horse-drawn cart. Signs on the walls advertised cigarettes and Coca-Cola.
“There’s something else you should know.”
“Wait. If we can really travel in time, we can go back and see Shel.”
Her eyes pleaded for the response she needed.
He reached across the table and took her hand. “He’s not dead.”
“What?”
“You and I had lunch at Applebee’s Wednesday. And afterward, we went to my place.”
“Yes?”
“It wasn’t so I could give you a Greek medallion.”
“Why, then?”
“Because Shel had been there earlier that morning.”
Her eyes slid shut.
“I wanted you to see him. But he’d gone by the time we got there.”
“He’s alive, and you let me go through that funeral?”
“I didn’t know then, Helen. Not any more than you did. I assumed he was dead, and that was the end of the story. But he showed up at the house.”
“All right,” she said at last, “where is he now?”
“I don’t know, Helen. Lost in time, somewhere.”
“So who’s in the cemetery?”
“He is.”
“But you’re saying he’s still alive.”
In a way, he’ll always be alive. “Yes. He’s still out there. But he won’t come back.”
She was visibly struggling to grasp the situation, and to control her anger. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t know how.”
Her face had grown pale. When he’d finished explaining, her eyes looked empty. “You can take us back, right?”
“Home? Yes.”
“Where else?”
“Anywhere. Well, there are range limits, but nothing you’d care about.”
On the street, a couple of kids with baseball gloves hurried past. “And he thinks it’s inevitable that he’ll eventually get put in that graveyard?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand why he would.”
“There seems to be a force that doesn’t allow paradoxes.” He told her about Ivy, and about Shel falling into the ocean.
“So what do we do?”
“I don’t know whether we should do anything. With this crazy logic, he may be right. I wouldn’t go back either to get hit in the head and thrown into a fire. Would you?”
“No,” she said. “I guess not.”
“I have an idea how we might be able to resolve things, though,” Dave said.
“Hold on a second. Start with this: Do we have any idea at all where to find him?”
“I know some places to look.”
“Will you take me to him?”
“Yes. I think he needs you.”
A horse-drawn carriage clopped past. She stared at the quiet little buildings. White clapboard houses. “Nineteen-five,” she said. “Shaw’s just getting started.”
CHAPTER 40
There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.
—PUNCH
MARK S. Hightower had been Shel’s dentist for years. He operated out of a medical building across the street from the University Hospital, where Helen had interned and still served as a consultant.
Dave had met Dr. Hightower once. He was short, barrel-chested, flat-skulled, a man who looked more like a professional wrestler than a dentist. But he was soft-spoken and, according to Shel, a guy who was great with his patients.
Helen and Dave, in a taxi, pulled up in front of a brownstone building. The doctors’ names—there were four of them—were posted on shingles. Hightower was on the first floor. A sign in the window read: WE CATER TO COWARDS.
Dave asked the driver to wait, and, carrying a converter in a laptop bag, went into the office. One patient and a guy who was probably a salesman were seated in the reception room while two people on TV discussed the latest misadventure of a prominent actress. The receptionist looked up from behind a glass panel. “Hello,” she said, opening a window and sliding the sign-in sheet toward him.
“I’d like to make an appointment.”
“Are